On a moral and human level, the institution of slavery had destroyed them, too: “The slaveholder, as well as the slave, is the victim of the slave system.” As we saw earlier, Archbishop Desmond Tutu would later say something similar about South African apartheid, and James Baldwin said it, too, in 1960: “It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own.” In general, wrote Douglass, “a man’s character greatly takes its hue and shape from the form and color of things about him.” We are shaped by our surroundings. On the other hand,
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